Where Erin & Lisa Live: Podcast Episode 4

In episode 4 of the Maternity Sewing Podcast, Lisa and Erin chat about where they live (rurally in France and the Seattle area, respectively), what their homes are like (they both need lots of work) and the upsides and downsides to where they live (the biggest downside being access to fabric stores!).

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Transcript:

[0:11]Welcome to episode 4 of the Maternity Sewing Podcast. Maternitysewing.com is your source for maternity, nursing and postpartum friendly sewing patterns. Maternity Sewing podcast is where we have frank conversations, share stories and offer help and inspiration on things like sewing, pregnancy

[0:27] postpartum life and body positivity.Hi. I’m Lisa Kievits. And I’m Erin Weisbart and we’re the owners of MaternitySewing.com. Today on the maternity sewing podcast we’re going to give you a behind-the-scenes peek into our life talking about where we live.

[0:54]Yeah because we actually each live each live on different continents. Yes that is true. Very far away and funny enough we have never actually met each other in person. Although it does feel like we did meet in person. I think we should really see if we can make it happen sometime.Yes I agree, although I really want to come your direction because you know heading to France sounds quite ideal to me. Yeah I think I’ve never been to the United States so I think we both have an equal say in who’s going to go go first. Okay well I guess we just both have to travel. So do you want to start with where you live? Sure I live in on Vashon Island which is a little island outside of Seattle. You have to take a ferry to get here. I grew up in the Seattle area.

[1:52]well actually in Seattle itself and my mom moved out to Vashon when I was in high school so I’ve been familiar with the islands for a long time but never actually lived here until a few years ago.

[2:09] My husband and I decided we were done in San Francisco. I finished grad school there and we were able to start our new life together I guess he was my fiance at the time. We ended up deciding that we were going to move up to the Seattle area to be livingnear family and decided that rural life on Vashon was a good fit for us and where we wanted to be. Nice it always sounds like really idyllic to live on an island. It does. It’s really idyllic in many ways until you know you have to have a flight at 7 a.m. and that means in order to be there you have to get on a 4 a.m. ferry to make sure that you got there in plenty of time because you do actually have to take a ferry to get on and off my island. Or Friday nights when everybody wants to come onto the island for the weekend. Our population on the island doubles in the summer as there’s a lot of people who have summer houses or tourists and everything come out here and so on a Friday evening it’s just you just don’t come home on Friday evening cuz you don’t want to wait in the ferry line for 3 hours so there’s some costs and benefits. Yeah, I can imagine.

[3:27] I think that’s maybe true of a lot of rural area areas. I think we have the same. So I live in France in the Morvan region to it’s a Regional Parkand it’s also there’s a lot of tourists in summer as well and it’s really it’s surprisingly full of Dutch people as well even though we live in France but it’s like it’s about an 8-hour drive from the Netherlands. I think if you go into France it’s the first

[3:59] region where there’s actually some hills and it’s really green and it just looks really like you would imagine France maybe. And so a lot of Dutch people come here as well in the summer. In the winter it’s just there’s no one here it’s just like even the French they complain about how quiet it is. Yeah so we are Dutch originally so. I moved out of the house in the Netherlands when I was 18 and then I lived in the north of the Netherlands where I met my then boyfriend now husband.

[4:41]I think after that when we were working we decided we wanted want to go travel for a longer time so we bought an old van and we traveled Europe for about a year, a little less. And then we decided that we didn’t want to go back to the Netherlands and Stef’s parents already had a house here a holiday house so we knew the area and we decided that we would stay here and see how see how we would fare here and see if we liked it to live. It’s a dream of many Dutch people I think to live abroad, to buy a house in France specifically actually. But you know it’s it’s a dream is never the same as a reality so you always have to find out if it’s actually as nice as you think it will be and for us it was and we made it work and we’re still making it work.

[5:41]It’s been 4 years but doesn’t feel that long.I mean also yes as I said we also have quite ruraly so that the nearest town is 20 minutes away and it’s where we do our grocery shopping and it’s where Frida goes to daycare and it’s basically where we we go out to eat sometimes. It has one cinema so it’s really small but it has just one of everything so that’s that’s you know the minimum. Well all you need is one right? And we’re pretty happy with the location that we chose. What kind of house you live in Erin?

[6:27]Well so our house is a little funny and that it was built originally in 1920 and was a little craftsman cottage but in the meantime somebody there’s been a lot of changes to this house in the meantime. So the top floor was added on and a basement was finished and so the house has tripled in size since it was originally built so it’s a little, well it’s got its quirks.

[6:55]But it’s about 2700 square feet which it’s funny we’ve talked about this is like really not a large house for our part of the world you know especially rurally cuz you can build it big and don’t really have to worry about this size necessarily when you’re out here but I know very different than European houses so one big difference between where we live in. It’s funny when we first moved here to this house you know Adam and I had come from San Francisco where we lived in a San Francisco apartment and still to this day which is now 3 or 4 years later we still get confused about the fact that like we can go times when we actually can’t find each other in the house. We have a couple outbuildings and a garageand he has a little office and my studios in the basement and like he can be all the way upstairs in the bedroom and I have no idea where we are in our estate. You know we joke about calling it an estate because it’s just it feels so huge coming from where we lived together before. But it’s kind of an average size for where we live now.Yeah we talked about this before and I forgot the because you were in square feet square foot.

[8:11]I forgot what that was in square meters which is my which is how I calculate things. I remember that it was quite a bit smaller than than mine and it was and we experience our houses as really big. It’s the biggest house we’ve lived in up until now and so yeah that’s pretty funny.Our house is actually an old farm so it’s the region is known for small farms which are just long buildings with like the first part is then where people would live. The second part would be some kind of barn for animals. And then there was also always an added on a part for the tractor and all the equipment with big with those big doors that you can put a tractor through. So they’re basically all the same and but the nice thing about our house is that in the seventies it was, I’m not sure what it was before then, because we haven’t met the old owner from that time yet.But he was an historian and then he had like you a fondness for all things castle so it has all these elements that he built in that look a bit like a castle.

[9:34] We have this added on kind of tower a round tower with stairs in them like you would see in a castle. And it’s so funny because it’s not original at all. It’s from the 70’s but it’s still really nice to have all these things that look authentic but really aren’t. But it makes our house stand out from the other houses in the area so that’s one thing I really like about it. Before us the owners live here for 20 years. Different owners than the person who built it and they basically didn’t do anything in the house or in the yard in the garden so that’s why we still have a lot of work but yeah we still enjoy it.

[10:25]Yeah but I think one of the problems you and I’ve also discussed about living rurally like we have you know there’s amazing things about it but the biggest downside is access to sewing stores right? I mean I miss going when I lived in San Francisco my ride home between you know where I was going to graduate school at my apartment I could like.

[10:50]pull over on my scooter or my car or hop off the bus however I was going around and stop at two or three different fabric stores along the way. And that is just not possible here living rurally. Like it’s a day trip for me to get into the city go shopping and come back especially now that you know having a kid like doing anything is more difficult and you have to do it around nap schedules and all that.Yeah I think it’s the same for me it’s what. We do have one fabric store in town but it’s really expensive and they didn’t have a great selection. But we also have one market stall that is. It’s pretty hard to pin down when it actually comes to the market but they have not a big selection of fabrics but like a small selection but they usually have a great choice so I’m really fortunate to have just this one market stall. Like I said, we have one of everything. Yeah so we’re both mostly we mostly have to buy our fabric online I guess. That’s it for today’s episode of the maternity sewing podcast. You can find maternity sewing at maternity sewing.com, You’ll find our curated pattern shop of maternity nursing and postpartum friendly sewing patterns and blog we have sewing tutorials and inspiration for pregnant nursing and postpartum sewists and the show notes from all our podcasts.

[12:14]I’m Erin Weisbart, your host today and co-owner of maternity sewing. You can find me at Tuesdaystitches.com and on Instagram as Tuesday stitches. I’m Lisa Kievits your host today and co-owner of maternity sewing. You can find me at paprikapatterns.com and on Instagram as @paprika patterns.

[12:35]And you can always look in our show notes and on our website at maternity sewing.com/podcast for links to all the ways you can stay in touch with maternity sewing like our Facebook page and Facebook group. You can also find us on Instagram as maternity sewing.

Maternity Sewing was founded by Lisa Kievits and Erin Weisbart. They created Maternity Sewing to help you easily find all the best sewing patterns that you can wear in pregnancy and while nursing. Read more about Erin & Lisa.

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Size

Each pattern designer uses her own pattern block and size chart. Each pattern’s size chart is included in the product listing so you can ensure that the pattern will fit your body. Most designers suggest that you pick a size based on your pre-pregnancy measurements (especially for “maternity specific” patterns) and account for an average pregnancy weight gain in their finished patterns. If you are on track to gain significantly more or significantly less than average then you may want to select a larger or smaller size accordingly. “Maternity friendly” patterns may not account for a pregnancy weight gain and so you will probably get the best fit from going up 1-2 sizes.

To make it easier to browse for patterns that include your size, we have annotated all patterns as to how they best fit on the above size chart. So if you wear a size 18 on the chart above then patterns marked as including size 18 will have a size with similar measurements included in the pattern. Again, each designer uses her own size chart so it may not include the exact measurements. Note that the size chart uses high bust NOT full bust for size selection. This accounts for the fact that different patterns are designed with different cup sizes.

Cup Size

Cup size is typically measured as the difference between your high bust and your full bust. A = 1″ difference, B = 2″, C = 3″, D = 4″, E = 5″, F+ = 6″ or more. It is likely to be similar to your bra size. Because each person’s body has its own unique shape, for perfect fit you may still need to adjust a pattern even if it is the “correct” cup size to start.
During pregnancy, your breasts are likely to grow and you will probably find yourself 1 to 3 cup sizes larger than before pregnancy, depending on how much weight you gain and how your own unique body changes with weight gain and hormones.

Pattern Suitability

Early/Post Maternity: In the first trimester your belly may not look any different but you may feel bloated and find fitted garments, particularly waistbands, to be uncomfortable. You may find that your bust is already noticeably larger. In your second trimester your belly will really start to grow. In your fourth trimester (post-partum) you will still have a round belly but are likely to want to camouflage instead of show off your curvy belly. Garments that cling to the belly or garments with excessive gathering at the belly are not well suited for this reason. Maternity Sewing stocks a variety of patterns that may not have been designed as maternity patterns but are well suited for wear during the first, second, and fourth trimesters.Late Maternity: Maybe in your second and likely in your third trimester your belly is large enough that you can no longer wear non-maternity garments. Garments in this category have specific shaping meant to accommodate the largest pregnant bellies. These garments may not fit or flatter on a body without a large pregnant belly.Designed for Nursing means that the garment is specifically designed for nursing. This may mean nursing clips on the front of straps, extra moveable panels across the bust, or strategic garment openings. Note that you may still find nursing to be easy in a variety of garments that are not specifically designed to be nursing garments but only garments with specific nursing modifications are included in this category.

Difficulty

We have asked designers to rank the difficulty of their patterns as suited for beginner, intermediate, or advanced sewists.

Height

While most patterns are drafted for an average height, some are specifically drafted for short/petite women or tall women. Additionally, some patterns include multiple pattern pieces drafted separately for multiple heights. Note that average patterns may include shorten/lengthen lines on the pattern to simplify adjusting the pattern for different heights however these will only appear under “average” search terms.

Waistline

In garments with a waistline (especially skirts and pants), the waist of the garment can tuck under the pregnant belly or it can cover the belly. You may find that under-belly garments are easier to wear during early pregnancy and postpartum however many women prefer over-belly waistlines during mid- and late-pregnancy as a snug waistband can be uncomfortable at the under-belly.

Printing Options

Since all patterns on MaternitySewing are digital at this point in time, you must print your own patterns after purchase. Printing can either be done on your home printer (either 8.5″x11″ or A4) or on a large format printer at a copy shop (wide format or A0). Many patterns include both options.